Wuthering Heights: evergreen bestseller

The Guardian reports that 'Sales of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights skyrocket ahead of film adaptation', which is something the naysayers always struggle with.

Sales of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights have risen by 469% in the UK since last year, as anticipation builds for Emerald Fennell’s bold and highly anticipated film adaptation, figures from Penguin Classics UK show.

In January of this year, 10,670 copies were sold, compared with 1,875 in January 2025, in what Penguin has described as an unusually large boost.

Sales of the book increased by 132% after the release of the first teaser trailer for the film last September. Between the trailer’s release and the end of the year, Penguin sold 28,257 copies in the UK, compared with 12,134 over the same period in 2024.

Jess Harrison, publishing director for Penguin Classics, said: “I can’t remember the last time a film adaptation generated this much excitement for the book. Wuthering Heights is one of our evergreen bestsellers, but I do think the film is coming out at the perfect moment.

“There seems to be a real yearning among readers for intense, maximalist, tragic love stories,” Harrison added. “We’ve seen huge demand for similarly angsty classics like Dostoevsky’s White Nights and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat. But Wuthering Heights stands apart in being so wild and unhinged – an extreme book for extreme times.” [...]

“I don’t think an adaptation needs to be completely faithful to the book: many of the best ones – like Clueless riffing on [Jane Austen’s] Emma – aren’t,” Harrison said. “But what you hope for is that an adaptation will capture the spirit of the original. With Wuthering Heights, it’s the extreme intensity of emotion that matters the most.” (Emma Loffhagen)

That's what people should bear in mind before penning a letter to the Brontë Society, outraged at how they can 'allow' a film like Emerald Fennell's to be made (all before having even seen it, too) or leaving comments on social media calling for it to be boycotted. This is how the Brontë legacy is kept alive. No point in keeping a story immaculately preserved if no one reads it anymore.

Similarly, a contributor to The Yorkshire Post is 'excited that a new generation might come to love Wuthering Heights like I did'.

My copy of the book was cheap and flimsy because I preferred spending my hard earned wages from my Saturday job at Topshop on booze. Most importantly, my heart had just been broken for the very first time.

It was, of course, the end of the world, in the way that being dumped at 17 has been the end of the world for millions of teenagers since time immemorial. And in between angsty phone calls to friends and cryptic MSN status updates (if you don’t know what MSN was, it was a noughties cross between Facebook and WhatsApp), I found Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

If you haven’t read it, you might be dimly aware of the two main characters, Cathy and Heathcliff. The pair - raised together in the crumbling hall, Wuthering Heights - have a mutual obsession with each other which destroys both their happiness and that of many around them.

Aged 17, their doomed romance seemed to me to be the height of what it meant to be a human. What was the point in life if I couldn’t be loved in an all-possessing way, like Heathcliff loved Cathy?

When - and I must warn here, despite the book being published while Queen Victoria was on the throne, I’m about to spoil a plot point - Cathy dies, Heathcliff moans in agony. “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” I genuinely fantasised about having that quote tattooed on my ankle. Thank god my frontal lobe cortex developed in time to talk myself out of it.

From the vantage point of a 17-year-old girl, it was like Emily Brontë had reached her hand through the book to take mine, just as Cathy’s smashes through the windows of Wuthering Heights.

I’m not 17 any more, but I still love Wuthering Heights. It is a wild book, in every sense of the word. Far from being a conventional romance, the plot veers from passionate obsession to vengeance. Like the boxed in narrative of the book, it’s complicated. I love it because on every re-read, it takes me back to being that girl, one I remember so fondly even though my age has doubled.

But I also love it now because it’s not the uncomplicated love story that it was to me at 17. Now it’s a dizzying exploration of revenge, ownership, anger, servitude, landscape. There’s love, yes, but it’s also a book about hatred.

It’s an imperfect book - not nearly as ‘neat’ from a plotting perspective as Jane Eyre, written, of course, by the older Brontë sister Charlotte. I like to imagine that Emily wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, but that her pen wrote what she needed it to write in a kind of fever dream.

And now it’s set to capture new fans via the film adaptation released later this month. So far, I’m nervous. Director Emerald Fenell’s last film, Saltburn, was perverse and gothic and frankly bonkers, so I think she’ll capture the spirit of the book well. The landscapes are set to be stunning, with filming having taken place across the Yorkshire Dales. I’m also excited for the soundtrack, masterminded by Charli xcx. If ever a book fits her vibe of insouciance mixed with glamour, it’s Wuthering Heights. Cathy Earnshaw is, in my eyes, the original ‘brat.

But, famously, adaptations of Wuthering Heights are so hard to get right (though, for my money, Emma Rice’s stage production at York Theatre Royal a few years ago came as close as it gets). It’s too complicated, there’s a death every five pages, and half the characters have virtually identical names. And I feel very rude in saying this, but given I’m the same age as Margot Robbie, who stars in the film, I hope it’s forgivable to point out that she’s almost 20 years older than Cathy’s character in the book, and that matters. Lovestruck teenagers do and say awful things in ways we can forgive, in a way that we can’t of those in their mid-thirties. I should know.

But for all my reservations, I’m excited that a new generation might come, via the film, to the book. That they will choose to inhabit Emily’s strange, twisted world. That she will, like she did for me, reach out from 1847 and grab their hands to give them permission to be wild, and passionate, and angry. That maybe, like I’ve done so many times since, they’ll decide to visit Haworth to see for themselves the landscape that inspired such a poetic tale.

I don’t think I could have loved Wuthering Heights half so much now if I hadn’t read it for the first time then, and I’m so jealous of anyone who gets to experience it for their first time. The best literature not only reflects the way we think, it shows a mirror up to the way we feel. And if any of its new readers come to it heartbroken by the ends of their first loves, as I did all those years ago, so much the better. (Victoria Finan)

We are lucky today too as we have another article by a big name. Lucasta Miller writes about 'The mystery of Heathcliff’s race in Wuthering Heights' ('Is Jacob Elordi too white? Would Emily Brontë care?') for The New Statesman.

Emily Brontë’s genius was not for self-promotion. She hid her true identity under a pseudonym and agreed to pay £50 – more than the annual salary of a governess at the time – to get Wuthering Heights published in 1847. In contrast, the pre-publicity for Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation, due for release on Valentine’s Day, has reached carnivalesque levels rare even in Hollywood. Few have so far seen it. But the trailer alone has already generated a babel of online response. Critiques have ranged from objections to anachronistic costumes – Margot Robbie in what looks like an Eighties wedding dress – to complaints that Jacob Elordi is “too white” to play Heathcliff. The film has been compared unfavourably to Andrea Arnold’s gritty, arthouse adaptation of 2011, which cast a black actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff.

But who really is Heathcliff? Emily Brontë’s original text does indeed make it clear that his racial identity is supposed to be different from that of the Yorkshire-born characters. Picked up as a foundling on the streets of Liverpool, he’s brought to Wuthering Heights by old Mr Earnshaw, who tells his family to “take it as a gift of God, though it’s as dark as the devil” in a seeming allusion to the child’s skin colour. That neuter pronoun “it” suggests that Heathcliff is already being othered at the moment of his adoption. 

And yet no one in the novel ever discovers his origins. Edgar Linton thinks he might be either a “Lascar” – a term usually applied at the time to seamen from the Indian subcontinent or South East Asia – or “an American or Spanish castaway”. Perhaps, proposes the housekeeper Nelly Dean, his father was the Emperor of China and his mother an Indian queen. Elsewhere, he is described as “a dark-skinned gipsy”; and yet in one scene his face is depicted as being “as white as the wall behind him”. 

Andrea Arnold’s film recast Heathcliff as a survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, for which Liverpool was indeed a hub in the 18th century period in which the novel, though written in the 1840s, is set. She turned that imagined backstory into an eloquent portrayal of cycles of abuse. Yet there’s nothing in the text to suggest Heathcliff is black African. On the contrary, Nelly Dean specifically implies that he is not, when she tells him (with a casual racism that will make the modern reader flinch) that “a good heart will help you to a bonny face” even “if you were a regular black”. 

The success of Arnold’s film comes not from its slavish “respect” for the text but from its openness to treating it as an imaginative springboard. Over the years, Wuthering Heights has been adapted for stage and screen countless times, with spin-offs ranging from a now lost silent film to the unlikely Cliff Richard vehicle, Heathcliff: the Musical. And yet the truth about the original book is that much of what makes it a literary masterpiece is unfilmable. It’s an inscrutable text, probably intentionally so, that baffled critics when it first came out and continues to baffle scholars, not least because so few personal writings by Emily Brontë survive to explain what she intended, though the book itself hints at its literary context.

That Heathcliff’s race and origins are left purposely ambiguous reflects the destabilising techniques, clearly drawn from the gothic tradition, on which the novel relies for its uncanny effects. Another is the frame narrative: the way it’s told as a tale within a tale, sometimes within another tale. We’re held at a strange distance, while paradoxically, the vivid descriptive writing makes us feel as though we’re only inches from the action.

This is a tale of the supernatural – it’s a ghost story after all – couched in the language of naturalism. Domestic interiors offer themselves up with all the detailed solidness of their oak furniture. But even the realism over-reaches itself in the novel’s famous scenes of physical violence, which are so graphic as to teeter – perhaps intentionally – on the Tarentinoesque edge of parody. If you realistically filmed a grown man forcibly rubbing a child’s wrist to and fro over a broken windowpane until the blood ran down, it would be unwatchable.

Wuthering Heights remains a completely uncategorisable novel, whose unique voice can’t be assimilated to the norms of Victorian fiction. And yet both it and Heathcliff do have literary forebears. Behind his character lies the Byronic anti-hero “linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes”, to quote Byron’s own Corsair.

If the constancy of Heathcliff’s love for Cathy is his “one virtue”, it comes with overtones of sibling incest as the two have been brought up together as brother and sister. That too channels Lord Byron, refracting the transgressive love at the heart of his gothic tragedy Manfred, and also his notorious real-life affair with his own half-sister. Even the famous scene in which Heathcliff overhears Cathy telling Nelly that it would degrade her to marry him echoes a similar scene in Thomas Moore’s 1830 Life of Byron (a copy of which the Brontës owned) in which the teenage future poet overhears his first love tell her maid that she could never care for that “lame boy”. 

If Emily Brontë took these Byronic hints, she transmogrified them into something that was – and still feels – totally new and strange. Popular culture has since conventionalised Wuthering Heights into the archetypal world’s “greatest love story”, but it is far from that. No film version so far has fully represented the extent to which Heathcliff becomes a manipulative psychopath. And, despite the Byronic connections, one of the oddest things about the novel is the almost complete lack of sex. Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s works, which pulsate with frustrated sensual desire, it is often physical but never erotic.

Early reports have, in contrast, called Emerald Fennell’s version “a whole other level of hot”. Judging from the trailer, its sexy, operatic production values and pounding soundtrack couldn’t be more different from Andrea Arnold’s downbeat version, which was filmed without music or make-up and seemingly with a handheld camera. I admired Arnold’s take, but I’m looking forward to Fennell’s. I’ll be judging it not on literal fidelity to the text – which is impossible – but on whether it creates its own convincing world.

I’d also like – perhaps mischievously – to refer the Instagram costume cavillers to Chapter 7 of Wuthering Heights, in which the young Cathy returns from Thrushcross Grange newly and smartly dressed. According to the timeline of the book, it is 1777. However, her outfit is the obviously early Victorian combo of tartan and pantaloons: a “plaid silk frock” with “white trousers”. Emily Brontë wouldn’t have cared about fashion anachronism. But she would have been amazed to discover how many people care about Wuthering Heights.

Please make this article compulsory reading for every X-pert.

Mental Floss lists 'Everything 'Wuthering Heights' Says About Heathcliff's Race'.

Coincidentally, a contributor to the BBC writes about how ''The hostility has been relentless'.

Ever since it was announced, Emerald Fennell's version of the torrid Brontë classic has been the subject of furious online discourse over everything from its casting to its costumes.

The most controversial film of the year? Usually that accolade is reserved for an edgy political thriller or a taboo-busting horror movie. But the film that is currently prompting the most "discourse" – to use a polite term for it – is an adaptation of a 19th-Century novel. Ever since Emerald Fennell declared that she was following Promising Young Woman and Saltburn with her own take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, commentators have not been short of opinions – mostly negative ones.

"Fennell has channelled her creative instincts into a disturbing exercise in pointless destruction," wrote Lara Brown in The Spectator – and that was five months before the film's release date next week.

Everything about the film has been pilloried, from its casting to its costumes, from the actors' accents to the inverted commas around the title: it's "Wuthering Heights", not Wuthering Heights, to emphasise that this is Fennell's own interpretation of the book, rather than the book itself. The hostility has been relentless. But could the reasons for this hostility go beyond some scepticism about a dodgy-looking period drama? [...]

But these quibbles raise some big questions, the first one being: So what? Why shouldn't Fennell come up with her own out-there, sexed-up version of Wuthering Heights? If Clueless can put a Jane Austen plot in 1990s California, and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet can do the same with Shakespeare, why should we be fussing about dress design?

There are two obvious answers, one of them suggested by the fact that, in the trailer, Robbie's Cathy sounded posher than any screen character since, well, the toffs in Saltburn.

Fennell's last film, Saltburn, was set in a stately home, and one of the best things about it was that the writer-director seemed to know her upper-class characters intimately. There is no mystery as to how she managed it: as the daughter of celebrated jewellery designer Theo Fennell, she grew up in gilded circles. To quote Patrick Sproull in Dazed, "Not a lot of 18-year-olds have their birthday party photographed by Tatler and attended by a Delevingne, multiple Guinness heirs, several members of the nobility and the daughter of Sting." In short, Fennell is posh. Indeed, her background is so privileged that when she acted in The Crown as Camilla Parker-Bowles – now better known as Queen Camilla – she didn't have to sound any grander than she does in ordinary life.

This hasn't endeared her to everyone. As popular as Saltburn was, some reviews argued that it was too forgiving of its posh characters because Fennell was so posh herself. "It's a satire that never bares its claws, never lifts a finger to criticise these people," said Sproull. Other people have grumbled that Fennell's connections and advantages gave her directing career an unfair head start. This meant that many commentators were primed to dislike "Wuthering Heights" from the very beginning. The antipathy had as much to do with their feelings about Fennell as their feelings about the film.

But the main reason behind all the rancour is this: people who love Brontë's novel really love Brontë's novel. They're not just fond of it, they're fixated on it. As Hephzibah Anderson wrote in a BBC article, "Most of us read Wuthering Heights in our teens. In other words, when we're wildly impressionable." Many of the book's fans go on to view it as part of their identity – and, for that matter, as part of their love lives. "I remain convinced that the precedent for chasing toxic love stories was one set out for me as a teenager, by Heathcliff," confessed Olivia Petter in British Vogue. And she's not alone. Considering how devoted the novel's aficionados are, it was inevitable that any film which diverged from the text would be taken by some as a personal attack.

The irony is that Fennell professes to adore the book as much as anyone. At the Brontë Women's Writing Festival last September, she said that she had been "obsessed" and "driven mad" by Wuthering Heights since she read it as a 14-year-old. "I know that if somebody else made [the film], I'd be furious."

She's probably not too worried, then, that other people are furious about her. In fact, she may be quite pleased. Every time new information about the film emerges, there are thousands of impassioned words written about it, and while they aren't all flattering, they have undoubtedly helped to raise awareness and build anticipation.

Could "Wuthering Heights" really be as over-the-top as the trailers suggest, we asked. Could it be so-bad-it's-good? Or could it even be… good? Certainly, social media reactions from an early screening have been strong, with one film writer even moved to declare it a "god-tier new classic".

"I personally cannot wait to watch Fennell's Wuthering Heights," wrote Olivia Petter in Vogue. "I'll admit, as a dedicated fan of the book, I was sceptical at first. But now, I no longer care about accuracy."

The old saying about there being no such thing as bad publicity has never been more true. (Nicholas Barber)

Just let us question whether people actually love the novel or, rather, they love the idea of themselves as crusaders for the 'love' of a book.

Many sites are still commenting the fact (not actually factually in many cases) that Margot Robbie wore a replica of Charlotte Brontë's bracelet to the London premiere of the film, so it's a good time to quote the press release by the Brontë Society:

Last night at the London premiere of “Wuthering Heights” Oscar-nominated actress and producer Margot Robbie walked the red carpet in Leicester Square wearing a custom Dilara Findikoglu inspired by a bracelet that belonged to Charlotte Brontë.

The intricate, delicate bracelet features hair from two people, believed to be her sisters, Emily and Anne. During the Victorian era hair jewellery was fashionable and widely worn and it was common practice to make mourning jewellery incorporating the hair of a deceased relative. The bracelet is made of a wide band of braided hair with a gold clasp set with garnets and has been owned by the Museum since 1923.

The original bracelet is currently on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum alongside other examples of mourning jewellery.

Rebecca Yorke, Director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum said: “The museum holds the world’s largest collections of Brontë manuscripts, clothing and personal possessions and we take our responsibility as custodians extremely seriously.

“This event has offered us an unprecedented opportunity to share an item from our collection and tell its story with a global and contemporary audience, and we are thrilled that, thanks to director Emerald Fennell, Margot Robbie and everyone involved with the film, Emily Brontë and her masterpiece continue to be part of popular culture almost 200 years after her death.”

Rebecca continued: “We were delighted to work in partnership with Wyedean Weaving, based in Haworth, to create a faithful and high quality replica bracelet which Margot Robbie wore on the red carpet, and to facilitate visits from Dilara’s team to view the original bracelet.”

Wyedean Weaving has shared a lovely reel of the making of on its instagram account. An article in The Yorkshire Post also features the creative process.

A contributor to Veranda writes about 'the Hauntingly Beautiful Filming Locations in the New Wuthering Heights Movie'

I’m here to see it for myself. It’s a pilgrimage I’ve long dreamed of making, and I begin in York, the city where Emily Brontë’s sisters, Charlotte and Anne, rested overnight en route to seeking a sea cure for the tuberculosis that would eventually take Anne’s life (a small plaque marks the site of the long since demolished inn on Coney Street). Then I travel to the village of Haworth, where the Brontës spent the majority of their too-short lives.

“People have a very strong idea of the landscape when they think of the Brontës,” says Ann Dinsdale, principal curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. “They conjure up images of wild, rugged moorland scenery, and of course, that applies mainly to Wuthering Heights.”

She’s exactly right about these romantic notions, I think, as I explore the rooms where these writers lived—the small couch upon which Emily died, the narrow windows from which the sisters saw their world, the tiny books they created in childhood with handwriting so minuscule a magnifying glass is needed to read the words. I’m among those who have romanticized the world of the Brontës, as though I’ve created my own movie version of their landscape in my head.

Certainly, Emerald Fennell must have been aware of how strongly readers like me feel about the world of the Brontës when she set out to make her film. I learn that to find the ideal locations, her team tapped Aurelia Thomas, a veteran of British film and television, to be the supervising location manager of Wuthering Heights.

“It was very much the thing from the outset, how important the landscape was to this film,” Thomas tells me. “So much of the story, and how Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is so doomed and bleak in a lot of ways, comes from the setting and this feeling of desolation. The landscapes they walk in almost have a personality of their own. So it was a very important thing to find and to get right.”

Thomas and her team scoured the peat and heather moors of Yorkshire, looking specifically for open, wild land far off the beaten path (and often far from road accessibility). They deliberately sought filming locations that had not been used in previous adaptations of the story, instead spending months searching for places that would, as Thomas says, “feel different and epic.” They passed on anything too flat or too close to a village road, or anything that felt too idyllic or pretty.

Interestingly, this meant refraining from filming in Haworth itself, the village where Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights and the landscape where she would have freely roamed. Dinsdale notes that while Haworth has become “this rather haunting, kind of romantic place” nowadays, the Haworth of the Brontës’ time wasn’t entirely remote or untouched. Rather, it was an industrious, albeit very small, village.

The parsonage where the sisters lived and penned their works was perched at the edge of the moors and the edge of the village, straddled between two worlds. I feel that intensely. The front door of the parsonage looks out onto the graveyard, with enormous, moss-covered tombstones. The back looks out onto the edge of the moor. It’s haunting and eerily beautiful, yet also quite popular, both with tourists and those walking the many paths leading from the village into the countryside.

Instead, Fennell’s crew turned to remote stretches of moorland, specifically Booze Moor and Reeth Moor in North Yorkshire and Bridestones Moor in West Yorkshire, as well as Arkengarthdale Moor and Reeth Estate, two vast expanses of land. The result is a scene that feels otherworldly, epic, and wildly dramatic.

Yet it also feels somehow within reach. “The goings-on in Wuthering Heights are so Gothic and over the top. But the action isn’t happening in a castle in Transylvania—it’s in a Yorkshire farmhouse,” Dinsdale says. The places they filmed feel like real places, because they are. They are places of wildness that I can step into, landscapes I can inhabit.

The great 20th-century literary critic and author Elizabeth Hardwick observed that “the moors provide the isolation, the loneliness, and the removal that are essential to [Wuthering Heights].” I’d argue they also provide the central spirit of the story. The eternally restless and wounded feelings aren’t just emotions that Brontë wrote about in her novel or that Fennell depicts in her film. (Madeline Weinfield)

The Yorkshire Post has an article on 'How Yorkshire remains the star of this Hollywood blockbuster'.

The Brontës lived in the Haworth Parsonage - eight miles west of Bradford - from 1820 and remained there until the death of the last surviving family member, Patrick Brontë, in 1861.

Located on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, their life at the Parsonage had a profound impact on their literary works, particularly felt by Emily Brontë.

Charlotte Brontë wrote, “My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was – liberty.”

Emily Brontë was inspired by the real-life locations she would regularly come across whilst walking across the “wily, windy moors.”

For example, located just under three miles from Haworth Parsonage, the abandoned farmhouse, Top Withens, has a strong connection with the novel and is a popular pilgrimage site for literary tourists.

It has been associated with the inspiration for the Earnshaw home, but that has never been confirmed or verified. A commemorative plaque on the farmhouse states: “The buildings, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she described, but the situation may have been in her mind when she wrote of the moorland setting of the Heights.”

Written almost 180 years ago, Wuthering Heights has become an enduring figure in the pop culture zeitgeist with over 15 movie adaptations, many stage productions and a timeless music video from Kate Bush keeping the legacy of the novel alive and kicking.

Over the years, film productions have realised that one of the best ways to capture the mood and atmosphere which made Brontë’s novel so effective is to retrace the author’s footsteps and film in Yorkshire.

The first adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ was directed by A.V. Bramble and filmed in Haworth in 1920. However, the silent movie was considered lost for many years, leading to an appeal by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in 2005 to trace the film.

Speaking with the BBC, the librarian at the time, Ann Dinsdale said: "The film's makers went to a lot of trouble to ensure the accuracy of the film, shooting it on location.”

Like many filmmakers before her, Emerald Fennell also saw the value of filming parts of ‘Wuthering Heights’ in its original setting. It was a big task and “huge responsibility” to bring her vision of Bronte’s novel to life and one she described as “an act of extreme masochism.”

Speaking at the Brontë Women's Writing Festival in Haworth, Fennell said: “It's a huge responsibility because I know that if somebody else made it, I'd be furious. It's very personal material for everyone. It's very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private, I think."

She added: “It has also felt like an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you. I've actually found it quite harrowing, in a really interesting way.”

To capture the “misty and cold” atmosphere of the novel, Emerald Fennell shot her movie across various locations in Yorkshire, including Swaledale. Whilst in the North Yorkshire valley, filming took place at the ruins of the Old Gang Lead Mines, the Grade II listed Surrender Bridge and Melbecks Moor.

The cast and crew also spent time in Arkengarthdale as they filmed on Booze Moor and in Langthwaite Village.

Shazad Latif, who plays Edgar Linton in the upcoming adaptation, told the Yorkshire Post about his experiences filming in these dramatic locations.

“The set design created by Suzie Davies for the houses was unbelievable. Obviously, the moors were amazing. You can feel the echo of Cathy and Heathcliff’s spirit up there,” said Latif. “It’s a stunning place to be and it evokes the spirit of the story that’s been there for 200 years. And it’s bloody windy!”

Providing solace from the long and tiring days filming on the Moors, the cast and crew stayed at Simonstone Hall Hotel - a stately home renovated into an upscale hotel in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

The cast also spent time in local pubs after they finished filming and were seen in The Punch Bowl Inn (Low Row), The CB Inn (Arkengarthdale) and Green Dragon Inn (Hardraw.)

“I didn’t have much filming to do [in Yorkshire], so I got to sit in the pub and wait for Jacob and Margot with Alison [Oliver] and Hong [Chau.] We would have drinks and play pool. It was great being stuck in there together. There were peacocks running about and a waterfall where they filmed Robin Hood: 'Prince of Thieves', five minutes across the farm, so it was just an amazing setting to be in.”

Over the years, literary tourism has drawn people from all over the world to Yorkshire as they get the opportunity to explore the natural beauty and unique charm of the region. As Wuthering Heights is released in cinemas across the country, there will inevitably be a renewed interest in the beauty and mystery of the Yorkshire Moors, with people hoping to retrace the steps of Emily Brontë, Catherine and Heathcliffe [sic]. (Adam Davidson)

The Times has an article on Emerald Fennell.

Emerald Fennell isn’t mucking about with Wuthering Heights. “Inspired by the greatest love story of all time,” roars the trailer for her new film, blasting us with sodden shirts and brutally tight corsets, bloody sunsets and Versailles-worthy interiors. Margot Robbie’s Cathy strides across a moor in a windswept wedding dress and Jacob Elordi’s ripped Heathcliff licks a wall and growls, “Kiss me and let us both be damned.”

Damn Emily Brontë too because in the hands of Fennell, the writer-director behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, this is period drama at its most transgressive and maximalist. [...]

Timid this ain’t, and it all starts with Fennell. Richard E Grant, whom the director cast as a haughty aristo in Saltburn, salutes her “fearless, jet-black sense of humour and baroque aesthetic”. Wuthering Heights, he says, is another “story of an outsider wreaking havoc on a hermetically sealed world — class, sexual obsession, doomed romance. I anticipate that her vision will be the polar opposite of polite.”

“I like a physical response… and there’s nothing more physical than Wuthering Heights,” Fennell said on the Ruthie’s Table podcast this week. Brontë’s doomed and, yes, kinky romance is “extremely sexy… It makes you cry, it makes you recoil… It makes you question yourself.” Adapting it has been no moorland picnic. “I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book,” she told the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival last year. “There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism [in it]. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published in 1847]. But it’s been a kind of masochistic exercise working on it because I love it so much, and it can’t love me back.”

If anyone can pull it off it’s Fennell, 40, whose career has been powered by audaciousness, imagination and the marble-chiselled self-belief of the posh. The woman with a name like a Farrow & Ball paint shade started as an actress but moved with impressive briskness from playing Nurse Patsy Mount in Call the Midwife and an Emmy-nominated turn as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown to directing darkly glamorous, divisive movies. “In our culture now we get the brakes being put on creatively… We’re afraid of embarrassment,” she told Ruthie’s Table. “I don’t mind being embarrassing.” [...]

Film, though, is her main event and there she owes a debt to her star Robbie — Promising Young Woman and Saltburn were produced by LuckyChap, a company the Australian actress co-founded that specialises in female-focused projects. Wuthering Heights is the first time Fennell has directed her de facto boss, and some have cocked eyebrows at Robbie, 35, playing a character who is a teenager in the book. Fennell shrugged that off, describing Robbie as “the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything. I think honestly she could commit a killing spree and nobody would mind.”

She has also drawn flak for casting Elordi as Heathcliff, who is described by Brontë as “dark-skinned”. That was also smoothly batted away. “You can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” Fennell told The Hollywood Reporter. ““There are so many different takes. I think every year we should have a new one.” She cast Elordi after seeing him on the set of Saltburn one day. “He “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”. (Ed Potton)

Daily Mail also has an article about her claiming that "the making of Wuthering Heights was more of a cosy stitch-up than Margot Robbie's bodice - with casting done on WhatsApp".

People comments on Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi's appearances on last night's The Graham Norton Show where she said:

“I wasn’t always going to be in it. I was thrilled to be the producer, but at some point, we were talking about Cathy, and I decided to throw my hat into the ring,” [...]

Robbie continued, “I’ve always wanted to be one of Emerald’s actors and fortunately, she felt the same way. It worked out wonderfully.” [...]

“In my opinion, it is one of the greatest love stories of all time and it has a great cast and incredible actors. It’s a great film,” she added. (Latoya Gayle)

Marie Claire looks into ' What Wuthering Heights and the Corset Revival Say About Fashion and Female Agency' while Stylist also discusses why 'Dark Regency is the latest fashion trend'. There are many, many more fashion articles but let us overlook them as this is not really the place for them.

Vogue has an article on 'The Best Wuthering Heights Adaptations Are All About Creative Ways to Haunt Your Ex'.

Since its publication in 1847, the great, canonical novel Wuthering Heights has inspired more than 35 film and television productions, beginning with a silent movie in 1920 and growing louder and louder over the course of a century until reaching its 2026 Emerald Fennell–directed crescendo.

In this succession of adaptations, each filmmaker has gradually softened the original form—a dark and twisted story of obsession, generational trauma, and self-destruction—into something that more closely resembles a wild, cinematic love story. These adaptations, more often than not, have given credence to the saying, “Those who don’t create, destroy”—a saying that is also, ironically, the story of Heathcliff. Though Hollywood has continuously sought to portray him onscreen as a sexy, tormented, romantic hero, Heathcliff is really more like an awful boyfriend with a personality disorder who destroys the hearts and lives of innocents.

It is a testament to our culture’s tendency to confuse toxicity with the heights of romance that when we read Catherine and Heathcliff’s story, we yearn to be loved so intensely that it might actually kill us. It’s a fantasy—and, moreover, a misunderstanding—that many of us take years to unlearn: In fact, love is not measured in units of suffering. [...]

6. Wuthering Heights (1939), directed by William Wyler

This film, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, is debatably the most romanticized adaptation. It also only covers the first half of the novel, which is the half where none of the haunting takes place.

5. Wuthering Heights (1998), BBC Television adaptation

Directed by David Skynner, this adaptation may be the most faithful to the novel, although the logline feels like it should really be “a legitimately crazy man takes revenge on a nice guy who did nothing wrong besides care for the woman the crazy man claims to love.” Heathcliff acts like a whiny little baby throughout this film, constantly throwing tantrums, running away, and slamming doors. Simply put, he’s insufferable. And I’ve definitely dated him. Fortunately, Cathy does an amazing job of haunting him later, appearing as a literal ghost he can see on the moors and as a little girl in constant flashbacks.

4. Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” music video (Version 1)

In the infamous music video for the verified ’80s banger “Wuthering Heights,” camp and pop culture icon Kate Bush whirls her arms around in a white dress, repeating Cathy’s desperate cry to “let me into your window” over and over and over, her huge eyes staring into the camera. (I don’t think she blinks even once.)

She translates the gnawing, pining feeling in the novel, setting it to music that repeatedly crescendos, reaching a slightly higher pitch every time—which is sort of how it feels to be in a toxic relationship. Every time I hear it, it gets stuck in my head for at least three days. Come to think of it, becoming a musician might be the ultimate haunting tactic.

3. Wuthering Heights (2012), directed by Andrea Arnold

A raw and devastating adaptation—easily my favorite one to date. Arnold’s Heathcliff is much more fully developed as a character, in part due to the more restrained performances and Arnold’s highly sensory style. But the filmmaker also incorporates one of the driving struggles of the original Heathcliff that every other adaptation cuts out: i.e., the racism he faces. By not whitewashing the narrative, Arnold allows for greater pathos to emerge from Heathcliff and Cathy’s entangled backstories.

The movie ends almost immediately after Cathy (played by none other than Effy from Skins) dies, so the posthumous haunting is limited, but bonus points for Heathcliff being rendered as a real human rather than a cartoonish villain or heartthrob, which contributes to the melancholy atmosphere of the film that personally haunted me for days after.

2. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1992), directed by Peter Kosminsky

Sure, Heathcliff (played by Ralph Fiennes) is seen giving Cathy (Juliette Binoche) a piece of paper on which he’s written down every day she has spent with the Lintons versus with him, and that’s super toxic, but that’s neither here nor there. What’s more important is that Cathy haunts the shit out of him in the second half of the movie. With Peter Kosminsky using the same actress to play Cathy’s daughter (also named Catherine) after she dies, Heathcliff is forced to lay eyes upon her exact face day after day. Unfortunately, this method of haunting does require you to get pregnant and have a lookalike daughter that lives with your toxic ex while you roam around the moors screaming and disturbing everyone. While that is clearly not advisable, I do admire the commitment.

1. Wuthering Heights (2009), ITV miniseries

This two-episode miniseries stars Tom Hardy as Heathcliff, but you may find yourself getting confused by who Tom Hardy is playing and what movie you’re watching, given he looks nearly identical to both Professor Snape and Edward Scissorhands. The brooding is so over the top you can’t help but laugh every time he slowly appears from behind a pillar. But Cathy (Charlotte Riley) running out of her home, pregnant, in the pouring rain to search for her childhood crush felt relatable. And Cathy and Heathcliff’s chemistry is actually amazing—which makes sense, as the two actors who played them later got married.

Best haunting moment: When Heathcliff brings Isabella Linton home and tells her she has to sleep in a separate bedroom. This is because Heathcliff must sleep in his ex’s childhood bedroom, alone, next to a drawing of her. This is ideally how haunted I want my ex to be when he brings home a new girl for the first time. (Cazzie David)

Buzzfeed has a quiz where you can 'Choose Your Gothic Aesthetic To Reveal Your "Wuthering Heights" Sensory Landscape'.

Eleanor Houghton's much-awaited book Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes was published this week among all the Wuthering Heights furore but The Telegraph and Argus features it:

In the almost two centuries since the Yorkshire sisters wrote their passionate and brave novels, the light of Brontë mania has barely dimmed.

It’s shining brightly with anticipation now with Emerald Fennell’s ‘racy’ Wuthering Heights film landing in cinemas next week, and a fascinating biography of Charlotte’s life told through her extensive surviving clothing.

Dress historian and illustrator Eleanor Houghton’s book is as riveting as Charlotte’s iron-busked corset and reveals the story of her ordinary life in Haworth, forbidden love, and fashion choices when fame came calling. Eleanor has worked as a costume consultant for film and TV, including the BBC’s To Walk Invisible and Gentleman Jack, and Frances O’Connor’s 2023 biopic, Emily.

“The amazing thing about Charlotte’s clothing is that so much has survived,” says Eleanor, who researched and studied for her PhD, what she calls ‘the surviving witnesses to Charlotte’s life,’ through the gowns, bonnets, shawls, corset and boots that made up her wardrobe, along with letters and documents. Many exist because of a tradition of make-do and hand down.

“When Charlotte died, she left everything to her husband Arthur Bell Nicholls and he and her father Patrick and housekeeper Martha Brown treasured many items as keepsakes.” Some items that were dispersed to families and souvenir hunters have migrated home to Haworth with 150 pieces housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Charlotte’s garments and accessories play a vital part in joining the dots of her history in intimate detail from her birth to her death. “They have been active participants in a remarkable life - one that was both extraordinary, public and private, obscure and famous,” says Eleanor. “Secrets have been found within their very fibres. They challenge a lot of myths and preconceptions that we’ve had about Charlotte and her family.”

One such object that still bears signs of Charlotte’s perspiration is a busked corset that she laced excruciatingly tightly like ‘a form of armour that shielded and fortified’ when she was broken-hearted through the unrequited love that she bore for her former teacher Constantin Héger in Brussels. “She’s kind of girding her loins quite literally, giving herself this strength. I think the clothes can tell us so much, very personal detail that you wouldn’t necessarily pick up from a letter.”

Charlotte made most of her clothes with Martha, buying textiles from the mills and accessing fashion plates.

A Paisley print dress she owned dated to the 1840s was bold and bright, with a pattern inspired by silk shawls imported from central Asia. “One of the most astonishing discoveries was the bright colours of fabrics that we have revealed by examining fragments through a microscope and harnessing modern technology,” says Eleanor. “We imagine drab colours, but they simply weren’t. Globalisation is another insight.”

Charlotte owned a pair of beaded, deerskin moccasins made by members of the Mohawk tribe in Canada.

When Charlotte published Jane Eyre, she used the pseudonym Currer Bell to disguise her female authorship. When the cat was out of the bag and her secret identity uncovered, she needed to transition from a provincial clergyman’s daughter and governess to celebrated author, with some trepidation and nervousness. That meant wearing a suitable ‘power’ gown when she was invited to attend lunches, dinners, lectures and parties by enthusiasts, influencers and the literati.

When she met her literary hero William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair, in 1850, she wore a two-year-old Prussian blue dress woven at Salts Mill, from alpaca fibres from South America. The fabric was printed in Lancashire, probably in Accrington. Hand stitching by Charlotte and Martha still exists.

“She was in a very nervous state when she went to London for that important meeting in a new environment, a new world and meeting famous people,” Eleanor says. “When we choose clothes, we want to give off the right messages and feel strong, and Charlotte knew that was a potent force. It surprised me how important it was for her to gain strength through her regional identity and wear cloth woven in Yorkshire. She chose to connect to those Yorkshire roots.”

Eleanor has drawn an illustration of the Thackeray Dress, and the altered original is at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Poignant items include an ‘ugly’ or wind bonnet - strips of silk were worn over the brim to protect the wearer. They were the height of fashion at the seaside and Charlotte may have worn hers when she was in Scarborough with her sister Anne, who died there during their visit, whilst they were still in mourning for Emily. They had stopped on the way to purchase accessories in York.

“Surviving garments are solid witnesses because you can’t always trust portraits and photographs as they are often staged with props, they are not candid,” Eleanor adds. “The real Charlotte emerges as a woman altogether braver, more vulnerable, less isolated, less provincial and more fashion conscious than anyone ever expected.” (Catherine Turnbull)

Eco-critical Analysis of Human-Nature

 A new study was published in Iraq

An Eco-critical Analysis of Human-Nature Struggles in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Asst. Lect. Mohsin Kamil Shlaka,  Imam Al-Kadhum College I.K.C

Wasit Journal for Human Sciences, 22(1), 1363-1352.

This study focuses on the central role of the natural environment, particularly harsh weather and storms. It reveals how nature in the novel embodies an active force that shapes characters' emotions and choices, reflects their inner conflicts, and sustains a constant tension between the human and natural worlds. From this perspective, Brontë offers an early vision of modern environmental thought by highlighting the profound connection between human experience and the surrounding environment.

The research methodology employs a descriptive-analytical approach using textual analysis within an eco-critical framework. The procedures include a meticulous reading of the novel to extract natural symbols, environmental allusions, and images of the relationship between humanity and nature, followed by analysis in accordance with the principles of ecocriticism. This textual analysis and the ecocritical framework aim to provide a deeper understanding of the environment's role in shaping the narrative discourse and the characters' psychology.

Read More

A replica of Charlotte Brontë's bracelet on the red carpet

Last night, under the rain, was the premiere of Wuthering Heights in London. As usual, lots and lots of sites are talking about it, so let us just highlight a few. Vogue focuses on Margot Robbie's bracelet:

While Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights proved itself a lightning rod for controversy from the jump, Margot Robbie has the stamp of approval from Emily Brontë herself – or, as close as one can get to it, anyway.

For the London premiere, Robbie wore a replica of a bracelet once made of the writer’s own hair. A piece of Victorian mourning jewellery, the original piece was owned by Brontë’s sister, Charlotte, and made from Emily and Anne Brontë’s hair. Haworth-based Wyedean Weaving fashioned a reproduction of the 175-year-old bracelet. (Hannah Jackson)

EDIT: More details about the bracelet are available at the Brontë Parsonage Museum website: 

Last night at the London premiere of “Wuthering Heights” Oscar-nominated actress and producer Margot Robbie walked the red carpet in Leicester Square wearing a custom Dilara Findikoglu inspired by a bracelet that belonged to Charlotte Brontë.

The intricate, delicate bracelet features hair from two people, believed to be her sisters, Emily and Anne. During the Victorian era hair jewellery was fashionable and widely worn and it was common practice to make mourning jewellery incorporating the hair of a deceased relative. The bracelet is made of a wide band of braided hair with a gold clasp set with garnets and has been owned by the Museum since 1923.

Also on Page Six, Harper's Bazaar, Just Jared, and many others. Daily Mail focuses on the whole rain thing at the premiere.

Pinkvilla interviewed Jacob Elordi:

"Wuthering Heights has been around for so long that I think we all have a sense of what the story is that we’ve seen or heard about many times, but most of us really don’t know it, don’t know the text as well as we think. Hopefully, this film will reignite ideas that others already have about Wuthering Heights, as it did for me," he says. [...]

He shares his thoughts on getting into the project and choosing the script, "I knew that with Emerald Fennell, this wouldn’t be the traditional character that we know in our consciousness, but that it would be Heathcliff interpreted through her lens, with her unique point of view. She knows the character and this story so thoroughly, and I was really interested in that interpretation. I believe in her as an artist and especially as a director, and I want to be in her cinematic world, however I can."

This interpretation by Emerald Fennell (Killing Eve, Saltburn), who has scripted and directed the film, comes amid a lot of questions about turning it into an almost-erotica. However, the actor himself is quite well-versed with it, expecting so while stepping into the project. He is ready to provide full support to the filmmaker and adds, "What Emerald captured in her script and ultimately in the film is the spirit of Emily Brontë, the spirit of Wuthering Heights, what is happening in the subtext of the book. She’s interpreting it through her own lens, through a modern lens, and that was exciting to me." (Ayushi Agrawal)

BBC says the actor practised his northern accent in the bath.

Ever wondered how an actor from Brisbane, Australia, perfects a Northern accent?

The answer may surprise you.

"I just practise it in the bath, over and over and over and over," said Jacob Elordi, who is starring as Heathcliffe in the hotly anticipated new film Wuthering Heights, set on the tempestuous Yorkshire moors.

"I like the meks and the teks, instead of take. I like the M-E-K, T-E-K," he said, spelling the words out. (Noor Nanji)

Sky News shares a short video interview with Margot Robbie at the London premiere. Reuters also talked to her  and Jacob Elordi at the premiere:

"Everyone's talking about how steamy it is, but I think people might be surprised about how emotional it is," Robbie, who also produced the movie, said on the red carpet. "It's pretty heart-wrenching, but beautiful. It leaves you with that full feeling, if that makes sense."

Elordi described the experience of making the movie as "the greatest journey" and "a wonderful adventure", saying that his version of the famed literary character was grounded in Fennell's vision.

"I just wanted it to be as, I don't know, sort of, truthful as possible, I suppose. But really, I'm in service to Emerald, so I just wanted to do whatever she wanted with him," said Elordi, who previously starred in Fennell's 2023 film "Saltburn". (Hanna Rantala)

Condé Nast Traveler shares some of the filming locations.

The Guardian reports on Emerald Fennell's conversation at the BFI Southbank in London.

Emerald Fennell has revealed that Margot Robbie asked if she could play the lead role in the adaptation of Wuthering Heights before she had approached the actor to do so.

Robbie, whose production company LuckyChap Entertainment produced the film, asked if she could play Cathy after reading the script. “I sent it to them to produce, and Margot luckily asked if she might play Cathy,” said Fennell in conversation at the BFI Southbank in London.

“I was very nervous to ask her, because I think we have a different relationship, and I didn’t want to put her on the spot,” she said. “I was like: ‘Do I go for it?’ No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t, because she’s braver than me. She asked me.”

However the decision to cast Robbie in the role of Cathy has led to much scepticism and scrutiny ahead of the film’s release, specifically for its departure from the original 1847 novel by Emily Brontë.

Robbie, 35, will play Catherine Earnshaw who is written to be in her late teens in the original novel. The casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has also been criticised. In the book, the character is described by Brontë to be of “Gypsy” and “Lascar” (South Asian) descent, which accounts for the prejudice against the him in the book.

However Fennell defended her decision. “I can’t adapt the book as it is but I can approximate the way it made me feel,” she said. [...]

The director also spoke about the background behind the set design in the film, revealing that the wallpaper in Cathy’s bedroom was inspired by images of Robbie’s skin.

“We asked her to send us all her veins and her freckles, and then we printed it on silk and stuffed it and put latex over it so that it could sweat,” she said. “At first glance, you don’t see any of it, it’s just a beautiful pink room.”

“It’s like a visual example of what it feels like to be made a wife, to be made an object of beauty, to be a collector’s item.”

Other unconventional behind the scenes activity involved shrines Fennell made of Elordi and Robbie as a way to mimic the infatuation their respective characters have with one another in the film. “I was like: ‘I’m going to go through the internet, I’m going to find their best photos and then I’m going to make shrines in their bedrooms for each other,’” she said.

“So when Jacob went into his room, he had an insane shrine to worship not just Cathy, but Margot Robbie and then she had the same thing. There’s nothing more humanising than somebody’s first press photo.”

Fennell also spoke about the process of getting Charli xcx onboard to create the soundtrack for the film: “I sent Charli the script. Even though she was in the middle of the brat tour, the most busy person in the entire world, she read it immediately.”

“She called me and said: ‘What do you want?’ I said: ‘Well, a song would be nice.’ And she said: ‘How about an album?’ And I was like: ‘Yeah, cool.’”

“It’s so dorky, but it is my favourite album I’ve ever, ever heard in my life. She just got it.” (Sinéad Campbell)

The Guardian's audiobook of the week is aptly Wuthering Heights as read by Aimee Lou Wood, originally released in 2020:

Rare is the Wuthering Heights adaptation that fails to ruffle the feathers of the Brontë faithful. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film was criticised for its grit and gloom while Emerald Fennell’s new version, which arrives in cinemas on Valentine’s Day, was described as “aggressively provocative” after test screenings. Perhaps now is the time to return to the source material. In the audioverse, there have already been readings by Michael Kitchener, Daniel Massey, Juliet Stevenson, Patricia Routledge and Joanne Froggatt, though I favour this 2020 edition narrated by Aimee Lou Wood, of Sex Education and The White Lotus fame. [...]

Wood breathes fresh life into this tempestuous novel, capturing Nellie’s gossipy tone and the early wildness of Catherine and Heathcliff. As circumstances pull these once inseparable youngsters apart, that wild abandon curdles into desolation and discord that is carried down the generations. (Fiona Sturges)

In Vogue, fashion designer Joseph Altuzarra wonders whether Wuthering Heights was the Heated Rivalry of the Victorian era.

I first read Wuthering Heights when I was 10 years old, growing up in Paris. Or rather, it was read aloud to me in French by my babysitter, every Wednesday night, one chapter at a time, as I lay in bed. I remember the anticipation more than anything, counting the days until the next installment. But I also remember a persistent dread that felt inseparable from the thrill of the story. I could see it all so clearly in my mind: the wild windswept moors, the oppressive house, the dark Victorian clothes. Heathcliff especially felt terrifyingly, seductively alive. I was afraid of him and drawn to him in equal measure.

Nearly 30 years later, I picked up the novel again and read it in English for the first time. What surprised me most wasn’t just how different it felt but how difficult it was. The language is dense, complicated. I realized how much I had misremembered—or maybe how much I had romanticized. What I had held onto from childhood was the heat, the drama. But what I encountered as an adult was something dark and violent. Wuthering Heights offers very little comfort. It is a novel steeped in resentment and cruelty, in emotional and physical violence. There is very little tenderness or intimacy anywhere to be found.

And yet my attachment to the book never faded. In fact, it deepened. I loved Wuthering Heights so much that it became the starting point for my fall-winter 2025 collection. I was drawn to its severity, the way desire and repression exist side by side. I loved its darkness, its melancholy, and translating that emotional landscape into clothes felt instinctive. I even gifted the book to everyone who came to see the show, tucking small mementos and pictures within its pages to invite them into the same world that had shaped the collection.

When I reread Wuthering Heights for the third time recently, in anticipation of the upcoming film adaptation, I was also, like many people, absorbed (to use a euphemism!) in Heated Rivalry, a contemporary romance that shares, at least on the surface, striking similarities with Emily Brontë’s novel. Both stories are fueled by obsession, by that feeling that certain connections are inevitable, magnetic, impossible to resist. Both are about people who cannot stay away from one another, no matter the cost.

Yes, there are the obvious differences of time and place. And in Wuthering Heights, passion is not so much a choice as it is a sentence. Catherine and Heathcliff don’t just fall in love; they are overtaken and destroyed by it. Their love, which Catherine compares to “the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary” (ouch), leaves no space for tenderness, compromise, or peace. Heated Rivalry, by contrast, begins with obsession but doesn’t end there. Desire is acknowledged; feelings are named. Vulnerability is allowed to enter the story. Passion is not punished; it is tested, shared, and ultimately transformed. Love becomes something Shane and Ilya actively choose, not just something that happens to them. It is something that eventually heals them.

But both works—separated by two centuries—are not just stories of passionate love but of something more specific: exquisite, almost painful yearning. (You could add Bridgerton and The Summer I Turned Pretty to this genre.) Time and time again, we return to narratives built around ache and longing, stretched over long periods.

I wonder if this says something about what we are collectively missing. We live in a world of constant stimulation and access—to people, to images, to desire itself. Romance has become efficient, frictionless. Connection is everywhere, yet true intimacy often feels elusive or absent. We have, as a culture, become so good at swiping, ghosting, blocking, moving on, keeping things light that yearning almost feels subversive.

These stories don’t just promise romance; they promise intensity. They make desire feel consequential. In Heated Rivalry it shows up in the constant texting, the sense that Shane and Ilya are always thinking about each other, reaching for one another when they are apart. In Wuthering Heights, it takes a more feral form: an obsession that lingers long after separation and even death, an excitement bordering on mania when Catherine and Heathcliff are reunited. To want something—or someone—badly and over long periods of time feels almost radical in an age defined by immediacy and ease.

And both stories are about a fear of transgression that interferes with love. Brontë, of course, was writing in a world that allowed romantic love very few viable happy endings, especially for women and especially across class lines. Wuthering Heights was written at the dawn of the Victorian era, in a culture defined by rigid class hierarchy and strict gender roles. Marriage was economic.

Heated Rivalry is also shaped by constraint, just a modern version of it. Set within the hypermasculine world of professional hockey, where being openly gay can define—and destroy—a career, the risks are real. This is a love story between two men unfolding at a moment when “traditional” puritanical values are being reasserted, when gender roles are once again being tightly policed and social conformity is rewarded. And yet the story allows for the possibility of love blooming; it insists that intensity and tenderness can coexist.

Maybe this is why stories of yearning continue to grip us: They remind us that feeling deeply still matters, no matter what societal or other lines it crosses. That we all deserve passion, to yearn, to be yearned for. But where Wuthering Heights imagines love as destructive, contemporary stories like Heated Rivalry allow for revision. For choice, agency, care.

That evolution mirrors my own. I was once seduced by the idea of a love that overwhelmed, that burned. Today I am moved by passion that endures, that evolves, that makes room for tenderness, vulnerability, and intimacy without losing heat. If Wuthering Heights is a warning about what happens when love has no future, Heated Rivalry is a hopeful rewrite. Together they trace an arc from fatalism to agency, from tragedy to happy ending. And isn’t that an ending worth believing in?

Mental Floss lists '6 Romantic Period Books to Read if You Love 'Bridgerton'' and among them are

Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë and published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, tells the story of Jane, a strong-willed protagonist who grows up an orphan and faces cruelty at her childhood home and her boarding school. She grows up and becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she meets her employer, Mr. Rochester. Jane and Rochester’s deepening connection is put to the test by hidden truths and societal pressures. The novel points to themes of independence, morality, love, and social class structure following Jane's journey to find personal and emotional fulfillment in a restrictive Victorian world. 

Wuthering Heights

The Brontë sisters, or should we say, Bell Brothers, were on a roll in 1847. The same year her sister Charlotte published Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë (Acton Bell) published her only novel, Wuthering Heights. Set on the wild Yorkshire moors, this Gothic tale unites intense themes of passion, obsession, revenge, and conflict. The story unfolds through multiple narrators, the primary being housekeeper Nelly Dean, as the orphaned Heathcliff grows up with the Earnshaw family and forms a deep and  unstable bond with Catherine Earnshaw. After Catherine marries another man, Heathcliff returns rich and ready for revenge, manipulating the Earnshaw and Linton families. With its brooding atmosphere and hints of the supernatural, Brontë’s novel overflows with passion and lingering resentment. (Logan DeLoye)

According to Tatler Asia, Wuthering Heights is now one of '9 spicy classic novels to read this Valentine’s Day'

7. ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë

Set against the windswept Yorkshire moors, Brontë’s novel traces the all-consuming and often destructive love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Their bond is marked by obsession, jealousy and a relentless emotional intensity that drives the narrative across generations. Brontë explores how passion can both elevate and devastate, weaving in themes of revenge, social constraint and the dark impulses of desire. The novel’s Gothic atmosphere and raw portrayal of longing have inspired numerous adaptations, including the acclaimed 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, which captures the brooding tension and turbulent romance of the original story, and more recently, filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s theatrical version starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, set for release on February 13. The novel has earned its place among spicy classic novels to read this Valentine’s Day, for its unflinching depiction of emotional and physical desire, offering a canonical example of fervent and tumultuous love in literature. (Chonx Tibajia)

People who enjoy actual so-called spicy novels are going to be massively disappointed.

While Collider lists '9 Legendary Gothic Books [which] Became Movie Masterpieces'.

8 ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1847) – 'Wuthering Heights' (1939)

"Oh, God! It is unutterable." This one's back in the conversation thanks to the upcoming Emerald Fennell adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. Emily Brontë’s only novel remains one of literature’s most tempestuous love stories. Set on the storm-battered Yorkshire moors, it follows Heathcliff, a foundling consumed by his obsession with Catherine Earnshaw, a passion so violent it transcends life and death. The book is gothic in its claustrophobia and psychological intensity, delving deep into revenge, class, and the self-destructive power of love.

William Wyler’s 1939 film adaptation, with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Catherine, powerfully captures the tale’s doomed romanticism and elemental fury. It's a faithful reproduction of the novel's tone, if not all its narrative beats. The Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography transforms the moors into a landscape of emotional chaos, while Olivier’s brooding performance brings the character vividly to life.

7 ‘Jane Eyre’ (1847) – 'Jane Eyre' (2011)

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me." Emily's sister Charlotte revolutionized Gothic romance in her own way with this morally serious, psychologically complex tale. The novel follows orphaned Jane from a brutal childhood to her position as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls for the enigmatic Mr. Rochester, only to discover his terrible secret. Beneath these Gothic trappings is a moving story of integrity, independence, and female selfhood.

Cary Fukunaga’s 2011 adaptation, starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, restores the novel’s eerie sensuality and feminist fire. It’s one of the most emotionally authentic versions of the book, with less melodrama and more moral clarity. Fukunaga frames Brontë’s world not as fantasy, but as realism touched by ghosts of memory, trauma, and forbidden love. The film's muted palette and candlelit interiors evoke both repression and longing, while strong lead performances (from Wasikowska, especially) do the rest of the heavy lifting. (Luc Haasbroek)

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Intermediality and Female Agency

A recent Bachelor's Degree Final Project:

Intermediality and Female Agency in "Wuthering Heights": A Comparative Study of Brontë’s Novel and Emma Rice’s Theatrical Adaptation

by Andrea Villanova Pérez

Neumann, Claus Peter (dir.)

Universidad de Zaragoza, FFYL, 2025

Filología Inglesa y Alemana department,

 Este trabajo analiza y compara la novela clásica de Emily Brontë "Cumbres Borrascosas" con su adaptación moderna al teatro, escrita y producida por Emma Rice. Mediante una revisión del fenómeno de intermedialidad en el proceso de la adaptación, se exploran los elementos que han sido integrados en la obra de teatro para crear una reinterpretación contemporánea. Este estudio también investiga la manera en que ambas obras enfocan el tema de la agencia femenina, dentro de sus respectivos contextos. Se concluye que Rice ofrece una visión renovada y dinámica de la novela de Brontë, en la que se mantiene fiel a la esencia del texto original, empleando las características multimediales del teatro para conectar con la audiencia y fomentar la empatía hacia las inquietudes femeninas representadas.

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'Nothing beats the thrills and seductions of Emily Brontë’s novel'

Among all the Wuthering Heights 2026 news stories told and retold ad nauseam, there are always small gems. Today's is an article by John Mullan on 'How Wuthering Heights seduced its readers' in The New Statesman.

Nothing beats the thrills and seductions of Emily Brontë’s novel

"Drive me mad” implored the first billboards advertising director Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming film. So proverbial for passionate extremity is Emily Brontë’s novel that Wuthering Heights did not even need to feature on the adverts, which loudly proclaimed the film as a story of erotic compulsion. Is this what Brontë gave us? Is it why teenagers with a literary bent still love her novel?

‘“Drive me mad” is a phrase that does come from the book; it is spoken by Heathcliff, immediately after his beloved Catherine’s death, as he begs her ghost to haunt him. “I know that ghosts have wandered on Earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad!” As he finishes speaking, he smashes his head against the trunk of a tree, already stained with “splashes of blood” from earlier acts of self-violence. Maddened is just what he is.

Is Wuthering Heights a story of sexual obsession that we can still recognise? Fennell has said that she wants to do justice to the “primal, sexual” aspects of the novel. Yet the book is unusual in its depiction of sexual desire, which is obscure or unsatisfied or sublimated into anger. You might not guess from all the passionate embraces in film adaptations, but the love between Heathcliff and Catherine is never consummated. It is rooted in their shared childhood and early adolescence: she is only 15 when she becomes engaged to Edgar Linton, and the spurned Heathcliff, overhearing her say that “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now”, leaves Wuthering Heights, in the Yorkshire moors where they live, for three years. Only on his return, finding her married and mortally ill, does he, observed by housekeeper Nelly Dean, get to grasp her and give her “more kisses than ever he gave in his life before, I dare say”. The fact that she is five months pregnant by her husband is mentioned only six chapters later, when, aged just 18, she dies a few hours after the premature birth of her daughter – as if the reality of her marital sex life is to be ignored.

Nelly Dean, with the privileged access of a servant to the Earnshaw and Linton families, narrates most of the novel to a prim gentleman called Lockwood, who has rented Thrushcross Grange, the Lintons’ former home. Everything is filtered through these two, and the accounts of other characters that they report. The stories within stories can be dizzying. At one stage, for instance, Lockwood is telling the reader of what Nelly Dean has told him of what Isabella told her of a violent quarrel between Hindley Earnshaw and Heathcliff. What we see and hear is utterly removed from any authorial judgment. Who knows what Emily Brontë thought of how her characters behave? Film adaptations have been powerless to replicate the novel’s complex business of narrations within narrations.

Lockwood’s narration, which opens and closes the novel, holds within it a story that goes back 30 years – a family saga reaching across generations. With him we look into a world where characters are driven by passions that are extreme and sometimes unintelligible. The attentive reader will surely share his fascinated incomprehension. Heathcliff’s emotional expressions sometimes verge on absurdity. Comparing his love for Catherine to Edgar Linton’s, he declares, “If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in 80 years, as I could in a day.”

As well as being a vehicle of passion, the novel is a thing of great formal intricacy. Time is Emily Brontë’s element, and her novel has the most beautifully elaborate time scheme of almost any 19th-century novel. (Like Jane Austen, the author worked with calendars, or almanacs, to ensure a consistent internal chronology.) Events take place in times distant from its Victorian readers. First published in 1847, it begins with a date, “1801”, that thrusts the story back into the past, even for its original readers – for most, beyond their own memories. Once Nelly Dean begins narrating, it then travels even further back, for the unfolding of the story of Catherine and Heathcliff, to the 1770s and 1780s – the equivalent of a novel of today setting its main action in the 1950s and 1960s. We are removed to a time as well as a place cut off from the world. This is a Victorian novel designed to escape its times, with less connection to Victorian values than any other novel of the period.

The novel’s narrative structure enacts the way in which the present is sucked back into the past, but we are also sometimes jolted into the present tense of Lockwood’s confused processing of what he has been hearing and seeing. Present jars against past. Interruptions keep reminding us we are listening to a narration by Nelly Dean – “The clock is on the stroke of 11” – even as Lockwood urges her to continue. The reader shares with Lockwood the experience of waking up from a different time – the shock of re-entering the present.

Seasons revolve throughout the novel, each marker of the time of year usually a description of the weather:

On an afternoon in October, or the beginning of November, a fresh watery afternoon, when the turf and paths were rustling with moist, withered leaves, and the cold, blue sky was half hidden by clouds – dark grey streamers, rapidly mounting from the west and boding abundant rain.

Meteorology had never been so precise in English fiction before. Types of cloud and the weather they portend are exactly described. We are used to hearing Wuthering Heights being called “elemental”, and certainly its characters are closer to the elements than in most novels, closer to the cold and the wet, but also to the occasional blessing of warm days. Everyone is season-sensitive.

The reader may hardly be conscious of the frequent small details of the ever-changing weather, but they accumulate to convince us that this is a real place, with its own special climate. The sense of place is extraordinary, yet also utterly remote. In the novel’s first paragraph, Lockwood marvels at his new-found disconnect from the world. “In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society”. He jokes that it is “a perfect misanthropist’s Heaven”, which is as ill-judged as most of his jokes. Hatred of your fellow human beings does indeed flourish in this place. “My mind is so eternally secluded in itself,” says Heathcliff, near the novel’s end.

This is less a love story than a hate story. Like several other film adaptations of Brontë’s novel, Fennell’s version will apparently stop at its mid-point, with the death of Catherine. We will not have the complicated enactment of Heathcliff’s revenge: his tricking of Hindley Earnshaw out of the property of Wuthering Heights and ensuring his early death (aged 27) through alcoholism; his degradation of Hindley’s son, Hareton; his cunning arrangement of the marriage of Catherine, daughter of Edgar Linton, to his enfeebled son, Linton, ensuring that he becomes the owner of Thrushcross Grange, the Lintons’ family home. Ironically, without its second phase, the story is a grimmer one. It excludes the growing affection and final marriage of Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton. In Brontë’s telling, these two finally escape the bitterness and fury of the older generation.

It is strange that Heathcliff has become a Byronic anti-hero, even sex symbol. He expresses contempt for Isabella Linton’s marrying him “under a delusion… picturing in me a hero of romance”. However abused he was by the jealous Hindley in his youth, his extreme violence is unforgivable. On his first visit to Wuthering Heights, Lockwood notices that, when young Catherine answers him back, Heathcliff lifts his hand and she instantly springs to a safer distance, “obviously acquainted with its weight”. Much later in the book, we actually see him strike her down. Isabella describes how, when the drunken Hindley confronts him with a knife and pistol, Heathcliff wrenches them from his grasp, slashing Hindley’s arm. He then “kicked and trampled on him, and dashed his head repeatedly against the flags”. When Isabella tells him that he would have proved an “abominable” husband to Catherine too, he throws a knife at her head, cutting her beneath the ear. She throws a knife back at him. Violence spreads from one character to another. No film has dared do justice to it.

The first reviewers were both intrigued and repelled. “The general effect is inexpressibly painful. We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity,” wrote one. Yet the same reviewer added, “The reality of unreality has never been so aptly illustrated as in the scenes of almost savage life which Ellis Bell has brought so vividly before us”. “The reality of unreality” seems a good phrase for the credibility and yet utter peculiarity of this novel, which will always take us to its own remote place and time zone.

Compare that to Helen Coffey's cry in The Independent: 'I’m ready to admit it – Wuthering Heights is an awful, awful book' and 'It’s a shame, then, that it’s such an uncompromisingly terrible read'.

"Believe women” is a phrase we’ve heard a lot in recent times – and quite rightly. But there is one instance in which, I must confess, I don’t believe women. And that is every time one tells me that Wuthering Heights is her favourite book.

Let's stop here for a minute: why only women? 

I still remember the first time I picked up a copy of Emily Brontë’s much-vaunted 1847 literary classic. I’d loved eldest Brontë sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre; I’d developed a soft spot for the quiet radicalism of youngest sister Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Now, in my mid-twenties, it was finally time to take on the most extravagant, gothic of masterpieces, penned by the extraordinary middle child herself.

Ill-fated lovers torn asunder, yearning across bleak northern vistas, desire so powerful it transcends the grave – I was all set to swoon over this “tragic love story” between Cathy and Heathcliff, in which the backdrop of the Yorkshire Moors “represents the wildness of Heathcliffe’s [sic] character” (this information having been gleaned from an episode of Friends in which Phoebe and Rachel join a book group).

And this Heathcliff character sounded like “a bit of me”, as they say on Love Island, a heady mix of Mr Darcy’s brooding, glowering allure and Rhett Butler’s arrogant, magnetic charm. I’ll admit it: I was ready to have my head turned by a sexy leading man in period dress. Sue me.

Yet it wasn’t long before I found myself experiencing the literary equivalent of all dressed up with nowhere to go. Each of the characters, I swiftly discovered, was profoundly and irredeemably unlikeable, by turns cruel, mean-spirited, selfish, wet and/or weak. This cast of misfits ended up dropping dead from all manner of fevers and childbearing and alcoholism and general malaise – which might have elicited some kind of emotional response, had I cared whether any of them lived or died. As it was, the only rational reaction to each demise seemed to be, simply, “good riddance”.

Just to make things even more insufferable, every one of them seemed to be called an unholy combination of the same names mixed together – Linton, Earnshaw, Heathcliff – in a way that scrambled my brain and rivalled only Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude for forcing repeated consultation of the family tree. The piece de resistance is surely Catherine Linton, herself daughter of the infamous Cathy Earnshaw, who marries first one cousin, then another, to become Catherine Heathcliff, then Catherine Earnshaw. It all feels nothing short of elite-level trolling from Emily.

Then there’s the novel’s non-linear narrative framework, which uses multiple narrators telling stories within stories within stories: a kind of early Inception with none of Christopher Nolan’s joyful spectacle. This device, largely panned by critics at the time, has since been held up as a stroke of genius – which just goes to show that you only need wait a sufficient amount of time before something becomes fashionable (as demonstrated by the cursed resurgence of the bucket hat).

Within all this relaying of tales, Emily also saw fit to write swathes of text phonetically to indicate certain characters’ regional accents. The reader couldn’t be trusted to imagine a thick West Riding brogue, and so we’re invited to wade through mind-curdling dialogue such as “T’ maister’s down I’ t’ fowld”, “Yah dunnut loike wer company, there’s maister’s” and, a personal favourite, “There’s nobbut t’ missis; and shoo’ll not oppen ’t an ye mak’ yer flaysome dins till neeght”. It’s enough to make me reconsider my stance on book burning.

And, at the heart of it all, that fabled “love story” between Cathy and Heathcliff. It’s been romanticised and elevated as some kind of tragic, star-crossed lovers’ tale across multiple big and small-screen adaptations over the years – the latest being Emerald Fennell’s upcoming “Wuthering Heights”, starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, with the quote marks intentionally inserted to stress that this zeitgeisty hot take is likely to stray pretty far from the original. The film’s release date is slated for Valentine’s weekend; the trailer pronounces it to be inspired by “the greatest love story of all time”. To which I can only scratch my head and say, “You what, mate?” I don’t know what Emerald’s been reading, but it surely can’t be the same book that has been consistently disappointing me for more than a decade.

Far be it from me to deny any woman the pleasure of losing her mind over Jacob Elordi sporting a gruff Yorkshire accent and a cravat, but let the record show that the character of Heathcliff, as Emily wrote him, is not a romantic lead. “Grade A a***hole” would be far more accurate a description: a nasty, spiteful abuser who, it’s very heavily implied, commits acts of sexual violence against his wife Isabella after marrying her out of spite. He’s literature’s deeply problematic toxic ex that we keep “hero-washing”, somehow collectively convinced that maybe he wasn’t really that bad, after all. (Spoiler: he was.)

His and Cathy’s doomed romance has about as much in common with love as a writhing pit of venomous snakes, a noxious concoction of possessiveness, jealousy and unhealthy fascination that poisons everything it touches. I suppose one could argue that they’re a perverted version of soulmates, but only in the same way that the two very worst people you’ve ever met were “made for each other”.

In fact, it seems to me that the only good thing to have come out of Wuthering Heights is the near-perfect 1978 Kate Bush song of the same name, which captures all of the novel’s best bits – and allows you to wail, “It’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home!” like a banshee while attempting an interpretive dance – without actually having to read the damn thing.

Of course, we’re all going to have different opinions and different tastes – what a world it would be if we were all the same, etc etc – but I’m afraid I simply refuse to give credence to the idea that anyone has ever derived genuine pleasure from trudging their way through this endlessly maudlin tale.

Yes, that's why it's 179 years after it was first published and we are still talking about it while it keeps on inspiring artists all over the world.

Onto more people who actually get the book: The New York Times wonders, 'Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ Actually the Greatest Love Story of All Time?'

Catherine and Heathcliff. Since 1847, when Emily Brontë published her only novel, “Wuthering Heights,” those ill-starred lovers have inflamed the imaginations of generations of readers.

Who are these two? Definitely not the people you meet on vacation. The DNA of “Wuthering Heights,” set in a wild and desolate corner of Northern England, runs through the dark, gothic, obsessive strains of literary romance. Heathcliff, a tormented soul with terrible manners and a worse temper, may be the English novel’s most problematic boyfriend — mad, bad and dangerous to know. What redeems him, at least in the reader’s eyes, is Catherine’s love.

As children growing up in the same highly dysfunctional household, the two form a bond more passionate than siblinghood and purer than lust. (I don’t think a 179-year-old book can be spoiled, but some plot details will be revealed in what follows.) They go on to marry other people, living as neighbors and frenemies without benefits until tragedy inevitably strikes. In the meantime, they roil and seethe — it’s no accident that “wuthering” is a synonym for “stormy” — occasionally erupting into ardent eloquence. [...]

This all-consuming love, thwarted in the book by circumstances, has flourished beyond its pages. Thanks to Catherine and Heathcliff — and also to the harsh, windswept beauty of the Yorkshire setting — “Wuthering Heights,” a touchstone of Victorian literature, has become a fixture of popular culture.

Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon played Heathcliff and Catherine in William Wyler’s 1939 multi-Oscar-nominated film adaptation.c

Since then, the volatile Heathcliff has been embodied by a succession of British brooders: Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy. At least for Gen X, the definitive Catherine will always be Kate Bush, dancing across the English countryside in a bright red dress in an indelible pre-MTV music video.

Now, just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’ll have Emerald Fennell’s new R-rated movie version, with Margot Robbie (recently Barbie) as Catherine and Jacob Elordi (recently Frankenstein’s monster) as Heathcliff.

Is theirs the greatest love story of all time, as the movie’s trailer insists? It might be. For the characters, the love itself overwhelms every other consideration of feeling. For Brontë, the most accomplished poet in a family of formidable novelists, that love is above all a matter of words. The immensity of Catherine and Heathcliff’s passion is measured by the intensity of their language, which of course is also Brontë’s. [...]

But the point of their attempts to justify their love is, finally, to show the inadequacy of words to capture the tidal movements and volcanic explosions of their souls.

They — and Emily Brontë — are giving voice to a shared experience that defies articulation, pushing language to the very limit of its expressive capacity and beyond.

Which is what romance lives to do. It’s a genre often proudly unconstrained by what is possible, rational or sane, unafraid to favor sensation over sense or to pose unanswerable questions about the human heart. How could Catherine love a man like Heathcliff? How could he know himself to be worthy of her love?

We’ll never really have the answers, which is why we’ll never stop reading. And why no picture will ever quite match the book’s thousands of feverish, hungry, astonishing words. (A.O. Scott)

Airbnb Newsroom announces that you can stay at a replica of Cathy's bedroom in Wuthering Heights 2026.

West Yorkshire’s Brontë Country is having its moment – rapidly becoming one of the UK’s hottest romantic destinations. As anticipation builds for Emerald Fennell’s new film “Wuthering Heights”, only in cinemas 13th February in time for Valentine’s Day, Airbnb data shows the film is putting West Yorkshire on the map for UK Gen Z, with searches for Valentine’s stays up 67% – signalling a new fascination with romance on the moorlands.1

With 40% of UK adults now travelling to locations they’ve seen in period dramas2, set-jetting is reshaping the travel map – with West Yorkshire catapulted into the spotlight as travellers seek out brooding landscapes, literary passion and timeless romance, as it stars as the backdrop to the classic tale and where most of the film was shot. In fact, searches among UK guests for Airbnb stays in Haworth – the historic Yorkshire village where the Brontë sisters lived and wrote – have surged by over 200% this winter compared to last year.3 

“Wuthering Heights” is a bold and original imagining of one of the greatest love stories of all time, centered on Cathy and Heathcliff, whose forbidden passion turns from romantic to intoxicating in an epic tale of lust, love and madness – a longing guests can discover as this Valentine’s as Cathy Earnshaw invites couples to step inside her lavish Thrushcross Grange bedroom in West Yorkshire for an immersive overnight stay inspired by Emerald Fennell’s sizzling take on the classic novel, exclusively on Airbnb. [...]

Inspired by Emerald Fennell’s exquisite film, the room channels Cathy’s intensity, offering guests a deeply personal window into her inner world, almost becoming a character of its own – a feverish ode to Cathy as devised by her husband, Edgar Linton. The skin-toned walls and layered textures make the space feel saturated with her presence, from strands of her hair woven into the table to the vein-like patterns that seem to pulse through the cushions. 

The dining room at our Thrushcross Grange is also brought to life, dressed in silver-toned finery and styled to mirror the film’s world. Here, guests will be served rich Yorkshire dishes during an indulgent and themed candle-lit dinner, echoing the opulent meals seen on screen.

Beyond these rooms, couples can fall in love again and again, with the stay also including a horseback ride across the countryside, an indulgent afternoon tea, and an intimate listening experience of Charl xcx’s “Wuthering Heights” – in their own modern, untamed Yorkshire moment. [...]

Cathy’s Bedroom will be available three separate stays for up to two guests each for  stay across multiple days between 27 February and 4 March, completely for free – exclusively on Airbnb. 

This is on many, many sites including Forbes, Ireland Live and Elite Daily.

The Guardian takes a look at the reactions of first viewers on social media and also has some paid content about the film: on the cast, on whether it will work as 'an antidote to today’s lacklustre dating scene' and on its 'captivating looks and sounds'. Inkl claims that Margot Robbie is channelling 'Brontë’s Cathy with unexpected jewellery' during her promo tour, while Hello! states that she 'reignites Brontë beauty' (?). The Independent wonders whether 'Wuthering Heights just set the biggest beauty trend for 2026'. Vogue (and many others, of course) has an article on yesterday's London photocall.

According to Time, Jane Eyre 2011 is one of 'The 50 Most Underappreciated Movies of the 21st Century'.

Even if you've never read Charlotte Brontë’s gothic romance Jane Eyre, you pretty much know the story: An impoverished but unabashedly intelligent orphan-girl governess arrives at the estate of a rich, surly, mysterious gentleman, who quickly realizes that this small, seemingly mouselike creature is the only human being on the planet who can understand him. In one of the most ardent lines ever committed to paper, he welcomes her into his life—"My equal is here, and my likeness"—with a sense of near-mystical wonder. Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2011 adaptation of Brontë’s book—starring Michael Fassbender as the brooding man-with-a-secret, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and Mia Wasikowska as the at-first meek but ultimately fiery heroine Jane—is tuned to the beating pulse of that line, without ever resorting to dumb, bodice-ripping cliches. Rochester is a man whose kindness is the cutting kind, and Fassbender, with his straight, even teeth and mocking eyes, knows it. Sex is threatening, as Brontë knew, and Wasikowska and Fassbender make this particular dance look exceedingly dangerous. He’s a feral being who looks as if he could swallow Jane whole, but she stands up to him in every way: Wasikowska’s performance rings with understated fierceness. Jane Eyre, as Brontë wrote her, is a small girl who makes for a big story. Wasikowska steps easily and naturally into those little footprints stamped out nearly 180 years ago, in a movie that makes them seem as if they were made only yesterday. (Stephanie Zacharek)

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